My awareness of the story of Chen Jinggu and her deification in the cult of the Lady of Linshui began in 1988 when I first returned to my guxiang (ancestral home) on Nantai island, in the southern part of the city of Fuzhou. Professing an interest in local myths and legends about women and children, I was given a copy of Mindu beiji (Collected Accounts of the Capital of Min [modern Fuzhou]). At the time my uncle, Chen Daisun, who had been a professor of economics at Qinghua and Peking University for 60 years, told me that he had read it as erotica when he had been a young teenager in the 1920s. I was also spellbound by the collection of stories that tell of Chen Jinggu's flight from the marriage sedan and her training as a Lü Shan exorcist, her refusal to learn the magical arts to aid fertility and childbirth and then ironically her death in miscarriage while praying for rain. Her transition from recalcitrant fiancée to sword wheeling royal shamaness, to deification as the goddess that protects women against lascivious men, enhances fertility, protects women in pregnancy and childbirth and their children into adulthood unfolds through a series of ripping yarns narrated in instalments full of delightful suspense. But to be carried away by the magic from those Fuzhou storytellers that had entertained my father and his family in their childhood would be to miss the deeper significance of the cult and its survival.

At the time Baptandier was completing the first book length study of the Linshui phenomena, La Dame-du-Bord-de-l'Eau. Her main source for the mature story is an earlier collection of the Linshui tales Linshui Pingyao (Linshui Pacifies the Demons), but her central focus is an anthropological study of the cult of the Lady Linshui as it survives in and around the temples in Tainan, Taiwan. The book The Lady of Linshui is a new improved version, beautifully translated into English by Ingrid Fryklund. It provides a more rigorous background than the French original, both historically and anthropologically, examining the cult in its post-Cultural Revolution revival at the base temple in Gutian, Fujian and in the newly restored temple behind my father's house on Nantai island. At the beginning of the book, Baptandier translates and introduces the stories of Chen Jinggu and her divinization in Song times as they are recorded in Ming local gazetteers and, for example, the Ming Soushen ji, a collection of biographies of the spirits. Most interesting is the way in which Chen Jinggu's stories are interwoven with more well-known religious figures. She is, for example, born simultaneously with the demon seductress Madame White Snake from the blood and a hair, respectively, of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion, and Chinese incarnation of Avalokitesvara. The two, Chen Jinggu and White Snake, remain locked in eternal combat, for having died on the river Chen's spirit kills and subjugates the snake, imprisoning its spirit in the base temple.

Using a gender analysis of the characters and their representations, Baptandier shows how the stories were and still are used to resolve the conflicts between women's roles in the traditional Chinese family as mothers and wives, and radical choices that either manipulate sex and power for personal benefit or reject the carnal totally in favour of following an ascetic path. Chen Jinggu, her enemies and an army of spirit reprobates that she reforms and controls embody all these elements. She and Madame White Snake represent the tensions between traditional female roles, the ascetic and the seductress. Like Guanyin in Xiyouji (Journey to the West) she is in charge of controlling and reforming a mischievous and immoral monkey. She castrates Dan Yun (Cinnabar Cloud), punishing his insatiable sexual appetite and thereby resolving the excess of Yang which it represents. Her body and her practice, extreme at all times, are represented as both the alchemical and ritual transformation of gender roles, ultimately directed to the pursuit of social and familial harmony.

As her book is primarily an anthropological account of a little-known cult, embedded in a rich description of its historical texts, Baptandier has not set out to defend a single argument but to employ an impressive range of different methods and sources to enhance our understanding of the power and energy of the Linshui cult. The book's originality is in both the material and the way in which the author has made a complex of legends and surviving rituals available to an audience that will include all those interested in anthropology, healing, religion, and gender studies at undergraduate level and above. At times the unsuspecting reader, especially those not having a basic familiarity with Chinese and Chinese religion, will get lost in a confusing cast of characters and places, as well as an ambitious multi-faceted approach to the material. But having to battle a little with complexity is a small expense for what is practically the first book, certainly in English, to provide in-depth insight into the role of women in Chinese religion.

Baptandier spent the period between 1979 and 1986 in Taiwan and became a participant observer at the temple in Tainan. She observed how the temple was used by modern women as part of their path to fertility, childbirth and childrearing. She describes in detail rituals such as those surrounding The Bridge of Flowers, a celestial region pre-dating birth where every woman is in dynamic interaction with a flower which she must cultivate, the source of her potential children who must cross this bridge to be born. She gives accounts of healing sick flowers and children through ritual exorcism. The passage across the bridge into life, and through critical guan “passes” in their development, as their entry into adulthood, is perilous and vulnerable to attack by various interested demons. Lady Linshui and her three divine sisters will aid mother and child with rituals, talismans and incantation.

Baptandier became a familiar feature of temple life both in Taiwan and at Gutian and Fuzhou, getting to know the main officiants and diviners, assisting them and having her role blessed by the goddess through the mediums, and in some ways becoming an official media representative for the cult. Watching the dynamics of politics, religion, and economics in the transformation of the cult between Taiwan and mainland China her work is fully cognisant of the inevitably of change in the preservation of tradition, and so now also of the agency of foreign participation in its longer trajectory. Despite being rooted in the particular ritual geography of Fujian, the Linshui story travels. It retains its impact today, not just for its entrancing and melodramatic tales, but also for the way those tales allow women to work out their own “truths,” resolving ambiguities of power and gender, of childbirth and profession, of individual and social identity that continue to rack us in our time.